The role of phonological salience in the acquisition of past tense morphology by Greek children with Specific Language Impairment

The aim of this study is threefold: firstly, to describe the acquisition patterns of Greek past tense by children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI); secondly, to investigate the relationship between the phonological salience of past tense in Greek and its acquisition by language impaired learners; thirdly, to establish an account on the nature of the impairment by comparing the acquisition patterns exhibited by SLI children with those presented by language unaffected ones. The performance of 10 SLI children in elicited past tense production is compared to that of chronological age matched (CA) and language development matched (LD) controls. Based on the claim that perceptual saliency aids acquisition (or learning), it is predicted that SLI children will perform better in the production of past forms of higher salience than less salient forms. The results confirm this prediction, providing support for the claim that perceptual salience does account for better performances in tense marking in Greek SLI

The role of morpho-phonological salience in tense marking: a comparison between Greek and Cypriot-Greek SLI children*

The current study investigates past formation in Standard Greek (SG) and Cypriot Greek (CYG) measuring the associated morphophonological salience and its effects on SLI grammars. Elicited production of real and pseudo verbs was carried out with SLI and TD groups from each variety. Results show that phonological salience of past formation affects SLI but not TD performance. Between varieties, the GR/SLI group performs better than CYG/SLI group with real verbs. We attribute this finding to the difference in the status of the augment in each variety

Evaluating New Approaches of Intervention in Reading Difficulties in Students with Dyslexia: The ilearnRW Software Application

The aim of this paper is to increase knowledge and understanding on how the implementation of language content through specialized software, such as the “Integrated Intelligent Learning Environment for Reading and Writing-iLearnRW”, can enhance learning during intervention procedures to enhance reading skills for children with dyslexia.The iLearnRW software is a newly designed tool that makes use of innovative technology and provides individualized intervention through games that incorporate learning activities, addressing those language areas that are most challenging for children with dyslexia in a highly entertaining and motivating way. Individualized intervention is provided through an underlying user profile, which incorporates these language features and is constantly updated as the child uses the software playing games, presenting language material selected based on his difficulties and recording his progress. A group of 78 students (52 male, 26 female) diagnosed with dyslexia, aged between 9 and 11 years old, was assessed for phonological, morphological and vocabulary skills. The students logged in the iLearnRW software on a mean of 14.18 days over a six-month intervention. After the 6-month intervention, the students were assessed once again on the same skills so as to establish the tool’s effectiveness.The results’ analysis revealed the following: (i) there was a strong constructional linkage between the profile entries of the sample, the language content of the tasks of the screening test as well of the games and its effectiveness in the students’ performance; (ii) the students who received specific guidance by their teachers, obtained higher success rates in most of the games than the students without any guidance, and (iii) the quantity of the language content and the time playing were not correlated with the students’ performance in the software’s games. Keywords: Digital technology, assistive computer software, dyslexia, learning environmen

Motion verbs in Greek and German: Evidence from typically developing and SLI children

In this paper we report on the findings from a Greek and German production task which investigated the expression of constructions involving manner-of-motion verbs with Greek and German adults as well as typically developing and SLI children at the age of 5-6 years. The results showed that the typically developing children, when describing motion events, differed from the adults in the integration of grammatical information into motion predicates. The SLI children on the other hand displayed problems with the use of grammatical aspect (Greek) and case marking (German) as well as with ambiguous constructions (Greek)

The status of gender and agreement features in the grammar of two SLI children

The aim of this presentation is to investigate the status of Agreement features and in particular [Gender] in the grammar of Greek children with Specific Lan­guage Impairment. Feature assignment is investigated with respect to Chom­sky's notion of LF-interpretability. It has been argued that AGR features (phi- features) on definite articles and adjectives are interpretable only in PF but not in LF, whereas phi-features of Nouns are LF-interpretable. If features that are non-interpretable at LF are mostly affected by SLI, then there should be a distinction between the assignment of [Gender] on Articles and Nouns, as [Gender] is considered an inherent property of the noun stem, whereas in adje­ctives it is a property of the inflectional affix. There should also be a distinction between [Gender] assignment as opposed to [Number] and [Case] assignment, features that are considered to be of a different status

Grammatical skills in Greek and Cypriot children with Specific Language Impairment: A comparison study

The current study investigates past formation in Standard Greek (SG) and Cypriot Greek (CG) measuring the associated morphophonological salience and its effects on SLI grammars. Elicited production of real and pseudo verbs was carried out with SLI and TD groups from each variety . Results show that phonological salience of past formation affects SLI but not TD performance. Between varieties, the GR/SLI group performs better than CG/SLI group with real verbs. We attribute this finding to the difference in the status of the augment in each variety

Morphophonology and compensation in Specific Language Impairment: Evidence from Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek.

The current study investigates the role of the morphophonological realisation of grammatical features as a compensatory mechanism for morphosyntactic deficits in specific language impairment (SLI). The phenomenon examined is past tense formation in Standard Modern Greek (SMG) and Cypriot Greek (CG) as it manifests a distinction in morphophonological salience realisation in the two linguistic varieties via differential use of a stress shift and stressed syllabic augment [é] required for past tense rule formation. Participants were pre-schoolers with typical language development (TD) and children with SLI. Subjects produced real verb (RV) and pseudo-verb stimuli (PV) in sentence completion tasks. Results indicated that morphophonological properties of past tense formation affected SLI but not TD performance. We attribute the results to the difference in the status of the augment in each variety and the effects it has on its realisation at the phonetic interface. Furthermore, verb contractibility appeared to pose particular difficulties in the performance of all groups.Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation GRCY/04406/1